"Server" to Server Connection and Command Blacklist

Hi,

Sorry for a newbie question. I am trying to incorporate Maxima into  
our LON-CAPA system (http://www.lon-capa.org/). I got it working, but  
it is less than beautiful, since it more or less does screen  
harvesting and needs to start a new Maxima process for every  
evaluation. I'd much rather have a running Maxima process, and just  
connect to it when I need something.

Of course I found the "--server" command line option in the man- 
pages, but reading this list, I found out that the Maxima server is  
really a client and needs a running server. However, all I could find  
was that usually xmaxima is this server.

I imagine I need to write a small server program that runs on some  
port, and then tell Maxima to connect to that port via the command  
line open, and then I talk to my server via another port or socket  
when I need something ... but then I am lost: I have no idea what the  
protocol needs to be. Any hints or code snippets would help.

Also, in Mediawiki's PHP script, I found a small "blacklist" of  
commands to filter for from student input - the list is

$maxima_blacklist = array("save", "load", "plot", "lisp", "includ",  
"compil", "file", "batch", "stringout", "translat", "stout", "stin",  
"block", "system");
(by M. Arndt (February 2006))

- a blacklist is nice, but is there a "safe" mode that disables  
system and disk access in a command line or configuration that I did  
not find?

Thanks!

- Gerd.